It’s the Thought That Counts

One of the most (no pun intended) thought-provoking presentations at the recent LeWeb conference in Paris was that by Ariel Garten, CEO of Toronto-based Interaxon.

Her company is a world-leader in thought-controlled computing. This is the stuff of the future.

With a single, and relatively discreet, sensor attached to her forehead, delegates at the Paris-based event could tell if the 31-year-old Canadian was either relaxed, or concentrating. The sensor detects her brain’s alpha and beta waves and Interaxon software interprets the signals.

Clearly a confident public speaker, she spent most of her time in front of the 3000 delegates in a pretty relaxed state. It was only when she had to speak French, or was concentrating on a delegate’s questions, did her brainwaves shift from a relaxed alpha state to a focussed beta state.

Trains users to relax or concentrate

Trained as a neuroscientist, Ms. Garten has been variously a fashion designer and a therapist before launching her company four years ago. “We are completely self-funded,” she said. “We bootstrapped ourselves. The initial money came out of my own pocket but that was rapidly paid back.”

Her company uses existing sensor hardware by Californian company NeuroSky and the Australian-based Emotiv Systems. “We do research to understand what new signals we can pull out, what new things you can do with new interactions, what new areas open up. And then we produce the applications.”

This is the early days of this technology. “It is a technology that allows you to know more about yourself. It allows you to understand where you brain is at.”

The software gives a feedback loop allowing you to know when you are shifting into a more relaxed state. “It’s like using a mouse. The more you use a mouse, the better you get at it. You get visual feedback as to where your hand is and soon you become expert mousers.”

Powerful computers key to the future

“The one thing you will be better at is focussing and relaxing. You will also be better at using your brain waves, better at switching between different brain wave states.”

Ms. Garten has been using the technology for many years. “I am good at relaxing. I find it easier to access states of being relaxed and chilled out, and easier to access states of being focussed.”

In her Paris presentation she showed a real life example: an iPad app linked to a headset, on its screen a rotating object. The more you concentrated on the object, the faster it rotated.

Thought-controlled computing had been waiting for computers to be powerful enough to handle the real-time signal processing, said Ms. Garten.

“The ability to crunch brain waves on the fly in anything more than one channel requires a lot of processor power. So to be able to crunch brain waves and run an application in real time also takes a lot of processing power. One of the things that has helped is things like MRI technology that allows us to pin point more areas of the brain and parts of the brain we can think about.”

Thought-controlled lighting

“It is hard to predict where the technology is going because you have two different factors. One is where the technology is, and the second is the adoption rate.

“So presuming our adoption in the next few years means in three to five years, your average person is comfortable wearing a single sensor system, then we can probably have some pretty interesting interactions in the ten year time scale where you are controlling a mouse, controlling the lighting in your home, and lots of other everyday interactions in a pretty seamless way.

“At that point I don’t think you are going to be thinking ‘blue’ and your screen will turn blue, that is something that is probably at least 20 years down the road, but we will probably be pretty comfortable using brain waves to control simple things.”

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Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.